Display is large, but not that good in sunlight

LG KC550 has a 2.4" display of QVGA resolution (240 x 320 pixels). Picture quality is excellent, with pleasing contrast and brightness levels. The bad news is the sunlight legibility, which is not quite there. Yet the LG KC550 fairs a lot better than the KF750 Secret. It's no secret that the LG Secret has a sunlight legibility that's severely handicapped by the glossy screen finish.

The display of KC550: good indoors, poor in the open

The LG KC550 keypad has strong and even white backlighting, which goes well with the display brightness.

Impressed with backlighting

Telephony

The LG KC550 offers smooth and problem-free performance when it comes to the most essential element of a phone - making calls. It offers good reception and in-call sound, with pleasing voice quality on both ends of a call.

Unfortunately, LG KC550 does not sport Smart Dialing - a feature that automatically looks up contacts, whose numbers contain the digits you type on the homescreen.

Calling Dexter

We also put the KC550 to our traditional loudspeaker test. Here is how it ranks against some of the other handsets exposed to the same challenge. The KC550 turned out as one of the loudest handsets we had tested. You can find more information about the test itself and the whole list of tested devices here.

Speakerphone test

Voice, dB

Pink noise/ Music, dB

Ringing phone, dB

Overal score

Apple iPhone

67.2

60.2

66.6

Below Average

Samsung U900 Soul

69.7

66.3

71.1

Average

Samsung i900 Omnia

74.3

66.1

73.6

Good

Nokia N95 8GB

75.7

66.2

70.5

Good

Samsung G400 Soul

69.7

73.5

84.7

Very Good

LG KC550

78.2

77.3

86.7

Excellent

Nice user interface

LG KC550 features the regular LG user interface. It scores high on visual appeal and user-friendliness. The menu looks are widely customizable making the fast and responsive device a pleasure to use.

The standby screen has information about the current time and date, as well as the typical status readings. It shows signal strength, the active profile and the battery status. In standby mode you can opt for displaying the shortcuts assigned to the four directions of the D-pad as an overlay on the screen.

You can display the homescreen shortcuts in standby, but the calendar is not an option

The menu structure of LG KC550 is straightforward and easy to work with. Except for a few strangely placed settings, everything else makes perfect sense. The different files and features are exactly where you would expect them to be, even if you don't have much experience with LG handsets.

A pleasant surprise was the fact that the LG KC550 can start up without a SIM card - that's rather unusual for LG mobiles. If you have a SIM card in, but you want to turn off all transceivers, there is also a Flight mode available.

Customizing the KC550

LG KC550 has several appearance customization options. There are two pre-installed themes - the Black 3D and Black line themes. The menu view modes don't differ across themes, unlike the very distinct layouts in the two themes of KF750 Secret. Other customization options include altering the main font style and the dialing font style.

The two themes and their layouts

A cool feature is that both of the available themes offer a liquid-like home screen wallpaper, which responds to the accelerometer input. So when you tilt the LG KC550, the dynamic liquid on your home screen changes its orientation too.